A recent trend of regreening formerly bare hills in central Vietnam is often described in the media as a form of recovery from 1960s wartime destruction. However, this modern framework of wartime “wasting” and regreening obscures a longer history of bare hills. Colonial explorers noted eroded slopes in 1877, and imperial land surveyors described stretches of “idle, fallow land” decades earlier. This article describes a longer history of a “wasteland” not only to challenge a presentist framing of environmental decline but also to recognize the historic roles people played in producing these spaces, often in response or resistance to state policies. Colonial engagements with land clearing and customary uses of “open” lands gave shape to colonial visions of “wasteland” and later spurred colonial environmentalist critiques, even calls for a new form of green colonialism via exotic tree plantations. Writing the history of such a “wasteland” is one way to decenter imperial, colonial, and nationalist teleologies that tend to emphasize the environmental “footprints” of state actions but not the reverse. This history of “bare hills” draws from a mix of historical sources to show how people produced this “wasteland” and why, at times, they maintained it despite state efforts at reclamation.

Many high altitude regions of the world are still occupied by traditional communities of people, whose livelihood is closely related to a narrow base of locally available natural resources. A survey was conducted in 1991–94 of two villages inhabited by Bhotiya tribal people in Dharchula block of Uttar Pradesh, India. Medicinal herbs (14 abundant species, with Partitella ramitchadalis accounting for >50% by weight) constitute 12–13% of total income to the villages. The harvest is conducted by children during August to October, around summer settlements (up to 4100 m altitude) to which the villagers annually migrate. Fifteen cooperatives with a 1992 membership of 7009 herb collectors and salespeople exist in the Dharchula block, and marketing is through two specialist government agencies. Conservation measures, including protected areas and banning of direct trade with purchasing companies, have not generally been successful; pressure on the plant populations has increased and there is evidence for decline in the resource. Cultivation appears to represent a viable option for the resource, and thus for the income of the traditional peoples who still depend on it.